like glass:

Here among old issues of the New Yorker and fashion magazines, literature and bottles of water and lost keys, the forgotton kingdom of Nuestra Senora de las Cosas Olvidadas. And yet all woven together, our molecules becoming acquainted with one another. Down to the fragments of atoms that compose this orchestral creation, the white of these walls and the soft yellow light in the corner. There are birds and memories and Cheerios and oil and electrodes and dried flowers, fingertips and nailpolish, sticky peanut butter. Songs like Mom used to sing, the same as the dreams I'll have tonight. Everything part of something bigger, like the strings of violins that sigh in harmony among bassoons, piccolos and crashing percussion, everything in its place, everything always, everything.
I had a dream last night about an ocean turned yellow and buildings that collapsed on themselves. When I woke up, there was no tragedy, only the familiar: someone in the kitchen, the sunlight through the curtains, the traffic rumbling somewhere beyond, the texture of the pillow under my cheek. And I drew that first breath awake, unravelling the images of yellowed seas and rubble: banished away into the subconcious. I lay there, for those first few minutes, strung between sleep and awake, trying to feel a part of everything, some sort of immensity.
I have a hard time inventing new things, so I often creep back into the refuge of memories, which I can reinvent and retell to my liking. I live off their color and smell, the cloudy taste of remembered flavors and the silkiness of their textures. They become metaphors, lessons, they become old friends and strangers that seem vaguely familiar. They're my own menagerie, my own kingdom of things half-forgotten. One day, I will make a garden of these memories, that I've nurtured back from the dead so they might bloom like orchids. When my bones creak and complain, I'll return to my garden and revel in the colors: lilac, mango, persimmon, chartreuse, soft brown like soil, the inside of guavas. But beyond their chatter, the songs collected that sound like a family of canaries, will be the interminable solitude of silence, the absolute quiet beyond Memory.

We talked about realismo magico in Literature class, rehashing Garcia Marquez and Carpentier, the primitive and the neo-creative. But a thought: reality is simply another construction, another cardboard box we play-pretend is our house. And magic is as real or as make-believe as we want it to be, as we ponder the difference between realms of the impossible and realms of the improbable (not my terminology, but very eloquently put).
It still seems like I'm inhabiting different worlds, each bound by its own senses and rules. Magic of the conventional sort seems farther away here, though I remember it dusting my childhood, flakes of gold that drifted through the trees and into everything I made up. There was a wild sort of Magic in South America, tall like mountains and older than the landscape of a people now forgotten. It was intangible, yet inevitable, woven into the mythology of the places we saw. Here, perhaps it's forgotten in the ordinary, left behind like dried leaves swept up in a sweltering day, lost lost lost.
They teach us in writing that things happen in threes, it's a magic formula that somehow feels appropriate, satisfying. So perhaps it's only natural that I find myself caught between three world, always in triangles that draw their lines across continents, across languages, across time and space and heart. But I can't help feeling like I'm not listening enough, like if I could understand these whispers and shouts it would make more sense, it would conjugate and connect and the magic would make itself known. Can a person every really exist in threes, always feeling like a piece of themselves was lost in another world entirely? Which do I believe, which is a dream?

Things have been noticeably different since the Spanish language abruptly exited to the left of my life. Now, whenever I hear that a sonorous accent, the lilt of Spanish speech that melts syllables together, my ears stand in attention like someone stranded and starving for food almost forgotten. It's a treat, a soft caramel melting in the heat, it's sweetness the same color of afternoon memories.

My apartment, all white and tiled, is noticeable absent of Spanish language, except for the rare foreign film forgotten in the VCR. The chatter of the stream outside, which is the incessant background song for our every interaction in #605, makes a sound like rushing footsteps, like the swell of applause, like a stiff breeze between leaves. It's different, and I find it lacks that sweetness that I loved so much in Spanish, the language like music that rose from the street and was caught in my curtains, the smell of melting caramel sticking to my sheets. Whispered and shouted and between giggles, the language that composed the sweetness of those days, now replaced with the sound of the stream forever running away, like boots marching.

Un recuerdo (because I have many, many, many now): On that stretch of sand that ran from your doorstep to the dunes in the distance, made the brightest white in the noontime sun. Summer was just ripening, and as ocean gew warmer she drew crowds to her shores, from all over the Continent. And how we would just lie there, pretending to be asleep, and be surrounded by the sound of a thousand people softly talking. It sounded like the waves, the organic ebb and flow of human dialogue mingling with the crash of saltwater. The Argentine, remember him?, with his full-mouthed Spanish spoken like music, lush and accented. The Chileans, and your accent that I always loved, echoing the place we both loved to the North. And Spanish! Warm like the blooming summer sunshine, that same sticky sweet caramel that stuck to the back of my teeth sometimes making my own vowels sound different.

I miss this language, that was never my own but always something I held close like a little girl. Sing me a song, won't you, sweet like sticky candy, something colored white-bright as that Chilean sunshine.